I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames. That's not to advocate against gaming, or to generalize all games, but I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not. I felt as if I was lacking in skills that I wished I had, and believe I could have learned in that time. I'm happier with myself after cutting down greatly on gaming, and I wonder if other people share the same joy of learning that I feel or if it's an unpopular perspective.
Add.: What I believe causes a game to feel unfulfilling is if after the game is finished the player, and the world, is (nearly) unchanged. If there's nothing to show for it. No new philosophy, no useful talent, no object created, nothing to share with others. Most games are equivalent in their impact to a bad reality TV show, a distraction from progress, a time sink, a void.
I find that videogames fill my "brain in neutral" space very nicely. If I'm just not in the mood to read, or get out, pick up some new skill or polish an old one, hang out with friends or do something productive (and sometimes you truly want to do nothing)... I find that videogames are a nice choice. I especially enjoy combining them with unabridged audiobooks that I might not otherwise bother reading/listening to otherwise.
The trick is to make sure that you resist the temptation to allow that empty time (like empty calories) to dominate your life. It's like ice cream... a little is great stuff, but don't make eating it the center of your lifestyle.
I went through that phase too, but deep down it was guilt- and anxiety-driven. Once I accepted that life is too short to learn everything or be the best at everything, and that I'm already really good at the things I care about and learn a lot at work anyway, I'm quite satisfied to spend free time playing games.
I feel like a lot of people desire validation and achievement as short-term feedback. When we go through middle and high school, you can find achievement in short-term feedback on academic assignments, or in extracurricular activities where competitive matchups are rather frequent. (The American focus on short-term "A for Effort" grading is debatable, in this context.) Then you go to college or the real world, and suddenly the goalposts become much further away, all eggs in a nebulous basket: academic research that takes years to gain the next level of credentials, career progression, dating, financial stability. Learning requires you to subconsciously justify self-designed goalposts - you have to set your own goals for when you can be happy with what you've learned - and that's just as nebulous as the real world.
I think many gamers would envy, and aspire to, your ability to have confidence in self-set learning goalposts. But rather than despair at not being able to do so, if they can sit down on their couch and be spoon-fed goals, a process to get there, and Steam Trophies when they do... and they are truly legitimately happy (a local rather than global maximum, to be sure, but who ever achieves the global maximum of happiness anyways?)... who's to argue against that?
Efforts like Khan Academy and Duolingo understand this dynamic; they break things down into achievable interim goals, with flashy rewards as you progress. But it's hard for serious learning apps to reach the mental intensity and dopamine release of, say, a successful boss fight. A company that can figure that out would do a lot of good for humanity... but why wouldn't they just be a game studio instead?
Isn't improving at the game an enjoyable end in and of itself? Getting really good at chess has few extrinsic benefits but nobody's embarrassed about it. Why is getting really good at Street Fighter or whatever any different?
I get anxious when I've played video games for too long instead of honing a skill or working.
I get anxious when I've been working or cramming info into my head for too long.
It balances out. Besides, it's important to allow yourself rest periods between bouts of learning to allow your brain to consolidate the new information and subconsciously draw inferences and review detail. Otherwise you reach a point when you've bitten off more new information than you can comfortably chew.
I also tend to play games that involve exploration of worlds I will never experience in my own life, mastery of skills that require cognitive precision and dexterity, or philosophical rumination. I find these experiences to be a positive addition to my world and my understanding of people around me.
Now that we are seeing real potential for VR, this is about to reach a whole new level. The line between games and educational tools blend more and more every day. Imagine a war game so visceral that it makes you cry, gives you PTSD, and completely makes you rethink the wars you support. Or full job or skill training courses. The potential for video games to positively impact our lives has never been greater.
>>What I believe causes a game to feel unfulfilling is if after the game is finished the player, and the world, is (nearly) unchanged. If there's nothing to show for it.
Maybe in a tangible way nothing has changed, but for me, when I finish a good RPG or RTS, I feel like I have inhabited a different world for a short time. I come out of games like that with fond memories of how the combination of the story, game mechanics, music, characters, etc all made me feel. To me it's just as real and satisfying of a memory as going to the beach with my wife and son or completing a difficult programming project. Every game has a unique feel in my mind: Super Metroid feels different than Baldurs Gate which feels different than Mass Effect. I wouldn't trade the time spent on making those memories for anything.
I can relate to you. Ten years ago (with 20 yo) i was playing WOW and skipping college. Before that, i was playing competitive Counter Strike and doing bad on high school.
Today i look back and think: if i studied and worked more, i would be much far by now. Probably rich. I´m creating an online business where i have to learn and create every day. And yes, i'm very happy doing it and not playing anymore (one year now).
But, what if ... ten years ago, playing World of Warcraft would lead me to a rich life today? What if it paid well to be a Counter Strike player?
I suspect i would be even happier. But that's not the truth of the world. Yet.
This is why I like games with a beginning & end, and an actual story.
The first keeps you from sinking unbounded time with it, and the latter actually can be enlightening, informative (ie, bringing in mythologies or historical context), and ethically challenging. Stuff like endless PvP matches or MMO grinds never held much appeal to me.
Sure, but these things aren't mutually exclusive: you can learn and create and play videogames too. Not every waking moment has to be productive. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, etc.
As with most things, the key is moderation: finding a balance where you're getting enough relaxation/leisure to keep yourself happy, while not dedicating so much time to it that it completely takes over your life.
I agree, I enjoy playing Civ, but realizing the absolutely astronomical amount of time I've sunk into it and all the things I could have done instead has really turned me off from it. Maybe it's an age thing; once you realize half your life is gone, wasting time like that seems less attractive than it once did.
Some people like listening to music while doing productive things, some like watching TV.
I play slow online turn-based games when at home doing really boring work. I can context-switch, engage my creative mind for 15-30s, and jump back into page 57 of the design doc I'm reviewing.
As for intense gaming sessions, I have young kids = unless it's appropriate for them (more and more the case as they grow up) I don't have time for it.
What I learned from activities related to being a gamer, decades ago:
- Built my own computer from parts, and squeezed more performance out of it through overclocking and tuning mostly everything that could be tuned
- Learned about networks, power grids and basic event planning setting up LAN parties
- Built a website for my team. Learned to program with PHP and to manipulate images
- Made many contacts, many of them software engineers, including the ones that got me my first jobs
- Lots of team related administrative tasks like screening and recruiting players for my team, creating strategies and tactics with fault tolerance in case of events such as missing players or reduced network connectivity
All this before I turned 18. All these skills and connections turned out to be incredibly valuable later on when I went through financial hardship during college, my former teammates showed up with job offers for programming jobs, which helped to sustain me and my family.
This is a feeling I've recently come across as well. While playing ARK: Survival Evolved, I came across the ARKServers.net server page, which shows the Steam name and play time of players on the server, to generate interest. I started scraping this into an Excel spreadsheet, and combined this with player ingame names, and also their tribe names. This gave me a basic report of tribe strength on the server, which I could share in my tribe's Skype chat.
After reading about tracking your Facebook friends on HN, I pressed F12 on ARKServers.net, waited for a request, then right clicked this and copied the cURL link. This returns a JSON payload of user names and play times. I used this as the foundation of a Powershell static site generator, with an HTML boilerplate generating a report every 60 seconds. I registered a domain cheaply with Google and host the site with IIS on my home internet.
I soon learned that any Steam server will return a list of players and play times when queried with the correct UDP packet. The ARKServers site was just running a PHP application called SteamQuery that performs the UDP call and turns it into the JSON payload. I'm still working to port this to Powershell.
After some time, I expanded the website. Now, the static site includes an HTML5 canvas that combines 3 JSON payloads (server, tribe, map) to show tribe base locations on a rotating map background, with player and tribe listed in menus.
The project is pre-3.0, needing bug fixes and a true dynamic map. But making the site has actually been more fun than playing ARK.
I'm in the same boat and it applies to games overall. I do make an exception for when there is a social component to it, such as playing games with friends.
I'm also not advocating against gaming. A game with enough strategic depth can provide that feeling of learning and creativity when you can share and discuss strategy with other players.
I feel like the trend in online gaming overall has transformed the social aspect into a more robotic process---getting auto-matched against strangers who never talk. Part of this might be due to the challenge of managing trolls/griefers. But I don't like to feel like the game has served as a mechanical distraction and not something that made life more interesting for an hour.
> That's not to advocate against gaming, or to generalize all games, but I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not.
I feel the same. I like games and still play them here and there (and enjoy them), but a couple points in the past I was clearly addicted to them. First it was DAoC that was like a second job, and then to a much lesser extent WoW.
I think if you treat games as entertainment/downtime things then they are fine. It's only when they start replacing TV, and then reading, and hanging out with friends, etc... that they really become an issue.
> I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not.
I totally identify, and yet somehow I feel that because gaming is such an important part of how I grew up that I would be very sad and never quite myself if I gave it up altogether. To me, a lot of important culture has its roots in video games - characters, storylines, social experiences with other friends, etc etc. It's a definitely time sink, but for me at least, a very important and defining one.
I always found myself unfilled with games. To me if anything it was 'work', to get to the next stage, fight the next boss or whatever. That's not to say I think it's a waste. I think for a lot of people it's a good activity. Personally though, a lot of my energy that would be put towards gaming is either put in my blacksmith hobby which is not at all close to professional, it's just a hobby. That and hunting birds that my labradors compete to retrieve.
>I felt as if I was lacking in skills that I wished I had, and believe I could have learned in that time
I play a fair amount of videogames, but what can I say? I have never felt that way. There are some deficiencies in my life, but the main reason they remain deficiencies is that I'm not even sure how to resolve them.
I suppose I don't care much about learning skills because I know I'll never learn everything there is to learn, so I'll always have to defer to experts in certain domains.
I create, and I also play a lot of games (nowadays more board games). I also now spend a lot of time with my puppy. I get enjoyment out of all of them.
Also, even though I like to think I can create some pretty cool things, I don't see how I could ever create anything as intricate, beautiful, or full of discovery as Jonathan Blow's The Witness. That was absolutely worth the 40+ hours I've spent on it so far.
> I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames.
To each his/her own, but to me, video games lost nearly all appeal when I started learning how to program. The only game I still play with any kind of enthusiasm these days is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. But all in all, if I have the choice of spending a Friday night playing a video game or programming, I'll go for programming almost all the time. (And roughly 99.999% of the programming I do in my free time is mainly to learn about something, not to solve some urgent problem.)
I still think video games have a huge untapped potential as devices for storytelling or education or as an artform of their own. But we've only been creating video games seriously for ... what? 30, 40 years? Books and theater have been around for millennia, and it took people quite a bit of work before sublime works of art emerged.
(Although I'll admit I was quite happy to discover that there is an open source clone of Doom, and I spent a few happy hours with it. Great fun!)
Have you tried modding or mapping? In high school a large part of my life was spent around learning to map for various games because it felt like a way I could actually give back to the community I was a part of while exploring the creativity of it.
I enjoyed making the content and seeing reactions to it and trying to one up myself then I did actually playing the game. In fact it gets to a point where you've seen enough behind the curtain that it loses a lot of its charm.
I feel lucky that in my high school days of excessive gaming, my game of choice was Garry's Mod, and I was really into modding it and creating new gamemodes for it. This meant that beyond the social connections that multiplayer gaming provides, I also had a "portfolio" of sorts, of all the things I learned and created. I definitely don't regret those hours.
I agree.
But there is one difference between watching a crappy TV show and playing a crappy Video Game:
You are actively engaged in playing the game. No matter how trivial it is.
Of course, if you pick a more challenging game, like an RPG/Puzzle, then the difference grows greater.
I also agree that it is more fulfilling to create something.
Which is the reason why I myself like to create ...
Guess I might go against the HN grain here. I played Counter-Strike competitively and professional from around 17-22 (I'd say on average 5-6 hours a day). I still play every now and then, but don't compete at tournaments or in leagues. I'm 30 now. Not only was my experience irreplaceable and positive (I made many life-long friends and met many cool people), but it also helped me with many other aspects of "grown-up" life:
- I learned to be goal-oriented and focused
- I learned how to lead and work with a team to succeed at a common goal
- I learned how to weed out shitty people that poison the environment
- I learned what it truly takes and how hard it is to be the top 1% at anything (even at a stupid video game)
- I learned how to negotiate contracts and balance budgets
I think being in the top-tier at anything gives a very specific outlook on things. Playing casually or "just for fun" never really appealed to me as I have a very competitive personality.
Playing starcraft 2 totally consumed my life from about 18-22. It was very similar to a drug addiction except I convinced myself it was positive because I would eventually be a professional. My addiction prevented my from working on the underlying issues that caused my to seek refuge in the game. It also left me with a host of physical RSI problems that have been a huge negative to my life + career. Although if I hadn't developed them I suspect I'd still be consumed by games.
In order to spend vast amounts of time playing video games you have to be at a certain level of privilege. I feel as if video games have cheated myself out of potential as well as those that my privilege obligates to help.
As with other addictions there are people who won't be consumed by it like I was, and prohibition isn't the solution, not sure what is tbh.
Very similar story to me: I played Starcraft 2 throughout college in a competitive fashion and made me feel worse. There was a period of time after that where after quitting I wouldn't touch a video game.
I've since picked up a Nintendo 3DS as an experiment now that I take long train rides to work, and it's been an amazing, relaxing experience.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, there are many different ways to enjoy video games without being addicted or even playing a lot. Starcraft 2 ladder play may be one of the more stressful ways of going about it from experience.
Kids or other all-time-consuming life-changing events. It's why the core of the "idle hands are devil's work" moral - excessive gaming could be considered a vice.
I used to play games a lot, and I don't now. It's not that I don't want to or that I wouldn't enjoy it, I just want to do too many other things more. I have a wife and a kid who demand a lot of my time, I lift weights, I try to play board games with friends, I work on hobby projects, I read books, I do chores, I go on trips. As much as getting immersed into the new Witcher game would be enjoyable to me, I just can't fit it in. All those other things are more important and make me happier.
One addictive aspect of gaming that the author doesn't mention is how immersive and perhaps addicting a good gaming scene can be. There are people that live and breathe competitive sports, with most people following a few teams, and it strikes me that videogames have way more addictive potential. First of all, the barriers to entry don't include winning a genetic lottery and/or having high level coaching from a young age, so there's a democratized element. More importantly, with e-sports, you can watch insanely high level play (often with engaging/entertaining personalities) 24/7 for free on your phone, without any of the annoying content protection and walls of most sports. I suspect I would have given up on Street Fighter a while ago without the burgeoning streaming scene keeping me hooked and Reddit offering a lively venue for discussion/learning.
So in a sense, it's not "just a game" like grinding away at an RPG or whatever in the 90's in my parent's basement was - at times it can feel just as social as experiences I've had in music scenes.
>155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November’s presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week
I'm among them. I play a few hours a week, after my wife and child go to bed.
I barely talk about games with any of my fellow adult friends, because for some reason it is still too needing a world where discussing programming, star trek movies or settlers of Cataan is commonplace!
I've been playing a single video game for more than half of my life (I'm 30 now). I've dabbled with other games, but this game and the community around it contributed a lot in making me the person I am today. I don't plan on stopping any time soon. In fact, for the past few years I've shifted most of my free time from playing that game to helping a friend develop cool shit[0] for it, so we can hopefully prolong its lifetime. Programming and gaming go so well together that I'm pretty sure I'll continue hacking on some old games when I'm 60.
I regret the amount of time I spent. It deeply harmed my health, harmed my social relationships, harmed my school, and limited my world. It was empty success.
My total `/played` in WoW wound up well over 2 years at this point over a 5 year period, I believe. And WoW was not the only game I've played. I've not logged on in years, and I don't care to reactivate and do the math.
On the other hand... they were inexpensive entertainment that worked out well for my living situations. Some of them provided great relationships and wonderful bonding experiences with other humans from all over the world. Games motivated me to get into software development.
Yet, had I limited myself in time and taken the time saved from games to doing more programming, more art, and more reading (all perfectly doable and feasible for the life situations I was in when I was spending time gaming that much), I'd be a better human today. Period. Video games are fine in responsible amounts, and I consumed in vast and irresponsible amounts.
These days I pull out Dwarf Fortress every couple months and spend the evenings on a weekend Striking the Earth, and that's appropriate and responsible in my life at present. I encourage my colleagues who have freshly graduated from college to limit their gaming and to use that time to improve themselves in other ways more engaged in the totality and diversity of human life.
I used to play video games a lot, especially 'builder' type games like Harvest Moon 64 or SimCity.
These days however, I feel guilty whenever I fire up a game, even one I really enjoy. I feel like I should be doing something more 'real', like playing guitar or building something, even if it's trivial.
It's strange, because in the end enjoying my time gaming with my friends or playing guitar with them or building things for them add up to be the same.
> more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week
Watching a single football game per week takes up more time. Honestly, 3-hours / week for an entertainment venue you enjoy is kinda small.
The average football game is 3-hours 12 minutes. The average baseball game is 2-hours 54 minutes.
I find it strange that in our culture, its fine to spend hours upon hours of watching Football, Basketball, Hockey, Baseball (and then play fantasy football and otherwise participate in social norms for even more hours throughout the week).
But a paltry 3-hours of video games spread out in a few sessions per day? That's outrageous!
----------
Lets compare apples to apples here. If you spend 3-hours gaming per week, its equivalent to watching a single game of football or baseball per week. Its honestly nothing to be ashamed of.
Now I played "Maple Story" (an awful MMORPG) for 4-hours a day at my peak. THAT is shameful and a waste. But 3-hours a week is more than reasonable, and just as healthy as any other entertainment venue. Hell, its arguably better to actually have your mind active in a video game than other, more passive, forms of entertainment.
Real hobbies (music, art, creation, programming, engineering...) probably are the best for your brain though. And you get useful skills to boot.
Honestly I don't see the thirty something generation ever giving up video games. They've been a part of our entire lives at this point. Once we're old, it will be a case where no generation has ever been without video games in some capacity.
I've been semi-hooked on counter-strike for the past few years. I started getting into it again after I got sick, and now some of my long distance high school and college friends jumped on the bandwagon again and we play regularly. Its a great way to stay in touch and socialize, as well as just have fun playing the game. Its also SUPER competitive which has its upsides and downsides. It makes the game dynamic, you constantly need to stay on top of the 'meta' to be good, but at the same time its tiresome, so its not a casual game at higher levels. As with anything, it does come at a real life expense - I have 700 hours on the game, and I need to remind myself when to cut the cord or to take a week off. I usually play 0-2 hrs a day now. Overall, spending a nice weekend outside with friends and family is a lot better than spending it playing video games.
> What did the game offer that the rest of the world could not? To begin with, games make sense, unlike life: As with all sports, digital or analog, there are ground rules that determine success (rules that, unlike those in society, are clear to all). The purpose of a game, within it, unlike in society, is directly recognized and never discounted.
I think this is really the underappreciated factor in why people prefer video games to jobs. For some people, it's not that they're lazy and games are an excuse to avoid work, it's that the games are actually a far better work experience than the average job. You don't have to go to any meetings where an HR manager breathlessly explains how the new performance assessment web app is going to make everything better, even though it just looks like a reskin of the one you used last year. You don't have to spend a single nanosecond thinking about whether you're going to be edged out for a promotion by someone who has a better rapport with the boss. There are no especially demanding customers or government budget cuts eating away at the revenue you're paid from. You get to just do the goddamn work.
Yes, playing games is fun. In no small part because they're carefully engineered to engage you, provide a path to success, and otherwise resemble a theme park experience. Even games like EVE Online that pride themselves on being massive PvP arenas are carefully tuned to make constant conflict a reality.
Not many people here know this but I have a youtube channel where I have done an absolute ton of gaming content (mostly minecraft, but perhaps most famously a Dwarf Fortress tutorial series), as a way to practice my speech and work through a very difficult stutter.
And while I still respect and root for my full time youtuber friends, for me it felt like such an emply lifestyle. Ultimately you're just walking along in other people's stories, experiencing other people's visions, and working within other people's limits was increasingly galling. And short of becoming unpaid labor for those games via their modding scenes, you are a passenger in someone else's car on someone else's map.
Like television (and probably better than television, from a cognitive perspective), gaming is a great escape. But making it more and more of your life as some of this article suggests is a recipe for gradually detaching yourself from real life, real problems and real accomplishments. It's an addictive escapism, and ever year the authors of said escapism refine their techniques in a ruthless competition to keep you captivated.
And the best minecraft fort or cleverest warframe trick I've pulled off pales in accomplishment to selling a company I built, teaching a new developer a new skill, or anything similar. The minute that gaming becomes an end until itself, you end up sliding down a slippery slope to irrelevance.
Fourth: economics. Since every game is reliant on this addictive incentive system, every gamer harbors a game theorist, a situational logician blindly valorizing the
optimization of quantified indices of “growth” — in other words, an economist. Resource management is to video games what African-American English is to rap music or what the visible sex act is to pornography — the element without which all else is unimaginable. In games as in the market, numbers come first. They have to go up. Our job is to keep up with them, and all else can wait or go to hell.
Numbers and economic incentive systems show up in many games, but they're not fundamental. Take a look at games like Journey, Portal, Gone Home, Yume Nikki, or many others which work just fine without numbers. The creator of Undertale, Toby Fox, had this to say in an interview (http://existentialgamer.com/interview-toby-fox-undertale):
TEG: I really loved the fact that many of the branches in UNDERTALE‘s story seemed to lead to miniature “voids” where I was forced to contemplate what I’d just experienced without being “improved” in any quantitative way. Do you think that as gamers and people we have become addicted to numbers / money / experience in general?
TF: The addictive quality of “numbers increasing” is what drives a lot of games. But some of the most important things in life can’t be accurately represented by numbers. As for people’s lives, I have no comment.
Playing games is rad and cool, and there are many studies demonstrating various cognitive benefits. One of my favorite was on the elderly playing Rise of Nations, a critically-acclaimed RTS that's a sort of blend between Civilization and Age of Empires: https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/206094
> The researchers found that training on the video game did improve the participants' performance on a number of these tests. As a group, the gamers became significantly better - and faster - at switching between tasks compared with the comparison group. Their working memory, as reflected in the tests, also was significantly improved. Their reasoning ability was enhanced. To a lesser extent, their short-term memory of visual cues was better than that of their peers, as was their ability to identify rotated objects.
Every 6 months or so I find a game that swoops in and eats up all my time. Usually it is a valuable and rewarding experience and its missed once I complete the game. Then I spend 6 months trying games from my steam library until I find another one that has that special something.
It's not the best method but I try to set a timer for 30 minutes 3 times a week and try a new game I've never played. It's obviously not a perfect method but often that's enough time to decide if I want to dedicate more time to that game.
I recently just started playing a videogame again. The last time I played was World of Warcraft in 2005. I stopped to fulfill my career goals, get a masters degree and strike it rich working on my own startup. Well, as the years went by I kept telling myself, any day now my startup will take off and I can go back to enjoying my life and do things like play video games. Uh uh. The only thing I have to show for my years of programming and working endlessly on my startup outside of work is horrible anxiety (I hope but it could be much worse). So, here I am, 12 years older and back playing World of Warcraft where I started. I should have been enjoying my life the whole time. Live and Learn.
If I would play games for 90% of the time I currently spend on Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook, etc, I'd be a better man. Happier and more effective.
Games, especially Japanese video games are why I got into programming, got into the games industry, why I'm on this site.
I limit my time playing them now due to work, my entreprenuerial engagements, wife and two children but I just got finished with Final Fantasty XV two days ago and it was the most magical time. Ignis is my new favorite
game character. I'm convinced games are a better story telling medium than books, movies and TV. I never remember the details of anything I've watched but with a game I always remember because i actively participate in caring for the characters, healing them, making them grow.
There is a negative side, they can be too engaging, too much fun and too rewarding in an instant gratification sense. Sales at your startup not going well? A game can make you feel good, getting bullied at school? A game will help, but really we should deal with the real problem and then make time for games. If you do that they are great and I'm convinced they will get better and we have not seen anywhere near the full potential yet.
[+] [-] laplace2|9 years ago|reply
Add.: What I believe causes a game to feel unfulfilling is if after the game is finished the player, and the world, is (nearly) unchanged. If there's nothing to show for it. No new philosophy, no useful talent, no object created, nothing to share with others. Most games are equivalent in their impact to a bad reality TV show, a distraction from progress, a time sink, a void.
[+] [-] M_Grey|9 years ago|reply
The trick is to make sure that you resist the temptation to allow that empty time (like empty calories) to dominate your life. It's like ice cream... a little is great stuff, but don't make eating it the center of your lifestyle.
[+] [-] pokeloki|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btown|9 years ago|reply
I think many gamers would envy, and aspire to, your ability to have confidence in self-set learning goalposts. But rather than despair at not being able to do so, if they can sit down on their couch and be spoon-fed goals, a process to get there, and Steam Trophies when they do... and they are truly legitimately happy (a local rather than global maximum, to be sure, but who ever achieves the global maximum of happiness anyways?)... who's to argue against that?
Efforts like Khan Academy and Duolingo understand this dynamic; they break things down into achievable interim goals, with flashy rewards as you progress. But it's hard for serious learning apps to reach the mental intensity and dopamine release of, say, a successful boss fight. A company that can figure that out would do a lot of good for humanity... but why wouldn't they just be a game studio instead?
[+] [-] emodendroket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kakarot|9 years ago|reply
I get anxious when I've been working or cramming info into my head for too long.
It balances out. Besides, it's important to allow yourself rest periods between bouts of learning to allow your brain to consolidate the new information and subconsciously draw inferences and review detail. Otherwise you reach a point when you've bitten off more new information than you can comfortably chew.
I also tend to play games that involve exploration of worlds I will never experience in my own life, mastery of skills that require cognitive precision and dexterity, or philosophical rumination. I find these experiences to be a positive addition to my world and my understanding of people around me.
Now that we are seeing real potential for VR, this is about to reach a whole new level. The line between games and educational tools blend more and more every day. Imagine a war game so visceral that it makes you cry, gives you PTSD, and completely makes you rethink the wars you support. Or full job or skill training courses. The potential for video games to positively impact our lives has never been greater.
[+] [-] navbaker|9 years ago|reply
Maybe in a tangible way nothing has changed, but for me, when I finish a good RPG or RTS, I feel like I have inhabited a different world for a short time. I come out of games like that with fond memories of how the combination of the story, game mechanics, music, characters, etc all made me feel. To me it's just as real and satisfying of a memory as going to the beach with my wife and son or completing a difficult programming project. Every game has a unique feel in my mind: Super Metroid feels different than Baldurs Gate which feels different than Mass Effect. I wouldn't trade the time spent on making those memories for anything.
[+] [-] marcofloriano|9 years ago|reply
Today i look back and think: if i studied and worked more, i would be much far by now. Probably rich. I´m creating an online business where i have to learn and create every day. And yes, i'm very happy doing it and not playing anymore (one year now).
But, what if ... ten years ago, playing World of Warcraft would lead me to a rich life today? What if it paid well to be a Counter Strike player?
I suspect i would be even happier. But that's not the truth of the world. Yet.
[+] [-] white-flame|9 years ago|reply
The first keeps you from sinking unbounded time with it, and the latter actually can be enlightening, informative (ie, bringing in mythologies or historical context), and ethically challenging. Stuff like endless PvP matches or MMO grinds never held much appeal to me.
[+] [-] smacktoward|9 years ago|reply
As with most things, the key is moderation: finding a balance where you're getting enough relaxation/leisure to keep yourself happy, while not dedicating so much time to it that it completely takes over your life.
[+] [-] lutorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
I play slow online turn-based games when at home doing really boring work. I can context-switch, engage my creative mind for 15-30s, and jump back into page 57 of the design doc I'm reviewing.
As for intense gaming sessions, I have young kids = unless it's appropriate for them (more and more the case as they grow up) I don't have time for it.
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
- Built my own computer from parts, and squeezed more performance out of it through overclocking and tuning mostly everything that could be tuned
- Learned about networks, power grids and basic event planning setting up LAN parties
- Built a website for my team. Learned to program with PHP and to manipulate images
- Made many contacts, many of them software engineers, including the ones that got me my first jobs
- Lots of team related administrative tasks like screening and recruiting players for my team, creating strategies and tactics with fault tolerance in case of events such as missing players or reduced network connectivity
All this before I turned 18. All these skills and connections turned out to be incredibly valuable later on when I went through financial hardship during college, my former teammates showed up with job offers for programming jobs, which helped to sustain me and my family.
[+] [-] stephengillie|9 years ago|reply
After reading about tracking your Facebook friends on HN, I pressed F12 on ARKServers.net, waited for a request, then right clicked this and copied the cURL link. This returns a JSON payload of user names and play times. I used this as the foundation of a Powershell static site generator, with an HTML boilerplate generating a report every 60 seconds. I registered a domain cheaply with Google and host the site with IIS on my home internet.
I soon learned that any Steam server will return a list of players and play times when queried with the correct UDP packet. The ARKServers site was just running a PHP application called SteamQuery that performs the UDP call and turns it into the JSON payload. I'm still working to port this to Powershell.
After some time, I expanded the website. Now, the static site includes an HTML5 canvas that combines 3 JSON payloads (server, tribe, map) to show tribe base locations on a rotating map background, with player and tribe listed in menus.
The project is pre-3.0, needing bug fixes and a true dynamic map. But making the site has actually been more fun than playing ARK.
Code on Github: https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape
Demo site (Currently inactive): http://gilgamech.com/ARKData/_Wiped_2_4__NoobFriendly_8xT_3x...
[+] [-] TheCowboy|9 years ago|reply
I'm also not advocating against gaming. A game with enough strategic depth can provide that feeling of learning and creativity when you can share and discuss strategy with other players.
I feel like the trend in online gaming overall has transformed the social aspect into a more robotic process---getting auto-matched against strangers who never talk. Part of this might be due to the challenge of managing trolls/griefers. But I don't like to feel like the game has served as a mechanical distraction and not something that made life more interesting for an hour.
[+] [-] matwood|9 years ago|reply
I feel the same. I like games and still play them here and there (and enjoy them), but a couple points in the past I was clearly addicted to them. First it was DAoC that was like a second job, and then to a much lesser extent WoW.
I think if you treat games as entertainment/downtime things then they are fine. It's only when they start replacing TV, and then reading, and hanging out with friends, etc... that they really become an issue.
[+] [-] alexchantavy|9 years ago|reply
I totally identify, and yet somehow I feel that because gaming is such an important part of how I grew up that I would be very sad and never quite myself if I gave it up altogether. To me, a lot of important culture has its roots in video games - characters, storylines, social experiences with other friends, etc etc. It's a definitely time sink, but for me at least, a very important and defining one.
[+] [-] brokenmasonjars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooseburger|9 years ago|reply
I play a fair amount of videogames, but what can I say? I have never felt that way. There are some deficiencies in my life, but the main reason they remain deficiencies is that I'm not even sure how to resolve them.
I suppose I don't care much about learning skills because I know I'll never learn everything there is to learn, so I'll always have to defer to experts in certain domains.
[+] [-] cableshaft|9 years ago|reply
Also, even though I like to think I can create some pretty cool things, I don't see how I could ever create anything as intricate, beautiful, or full of discovery as Jonathan Blow's The Witness. That was absolutely worth the 40+ hours I've spent on it so far.
[+] [-] krylon|9 years ago|reply
To each his/her own, but to me, video games lost nearly all appeal when I started learning how to program. The only game I still play with any kind of enthusiasm these days is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. But all in all, if I have the choice of spending a Friday night playing a video game or programming, I'll go for programming almost all the time. (And roughly 99.999% of the programming I do in my free time is mainly to learn about something, not to solve some urgent problem.)
I still think video games have a huge untapped potential as devices for storytelling or education or as an artform of their own. But we've only been creating video games seriously for ... what? 30, 40 years? Books and theater have been around for millennia, and it took people quite a bit of work before sublime works of art emerged.
(Although I'll admit I was quite happy to discover that there is an open source clone of Doom, and I spent a few happy hours with it. Great fun!)
[+] [-] wazanator|9 years ago|reply
I enjoyed making the content and seeing reactions to it and trying to one up myself then I did actually playing the game. In fact it gets to a point where you've seen enough behind the curtain that it loses a lot of its charm.
[+] [-] mikejmoffitt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonahrd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacmoe|9 years ago|reply
Of course, if you pick a more challenging game, like an RPG/Puzzle, then the difference grows greater.
I also agree that it is more fulfilling to create something.
Which is the reason why I myself like to create ...
...
video games! :)
Win-win: you get to create it, and play it.
[+] [-] hanksy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|9 years ago|reply
- I learned to be goal-oriented and focused
- I learned how to lead and work with a team to succeed at a common goal
- I learned how to weed out shitty people that poison the environment
- I learned what it truly takes and how hard it is to be the top 1% at anything (even at a stupid video game)
- I learned how to negotiate contracts and balance budgets
I think being in the top-tier at anything gives a very specific outlook on things. Playing casually or "just for fun" never really appealed to me as I have a very competitive personality.
[+] [-] robertcorey|9 years ago|reply
In order to spend vast amounts of time playing video games you have to be at a certain level of privilege. I feel as if video games have cheated myself out of potential as well as those that my privilege obligates to help.
As with other addictions there are people who won't be consumed by it like I was, and prohibition isn't the solution, not sure what is tbh.
[+] [-] some-guy|9 years ago|reply
I've since picked up a Nintendo 3DS as an experiment now that I take long train rides to work, and it's been an amazing, relaxing experience.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, there are many different ways to enjoy video games without being addicted or even playing a lot. Starcraft 2 ladder play may be one of the more stressful ways of going about it from experience.
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
How did you manage to extricate yourself, btw?
[+] [-] CardenB|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rthomas6|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|9 years ago|reply
So in a sense, it's not "just a game" like grinding away at an RPG or whatever in the 90's in my parent's basement was - at times it can feel just as social as experiences I've had in music scenes.
[+] [-] arcanus|9 years ago|reply
I'm among them. I play a few hours a week, after my wife and child go to bed.
I barely talk about games with any of my fellow adult friends, because for some reason it is still too needing a world where discussing programming, star trek movies or settlers of Cataan is commonplace!
[+] [-] 2Pacalypse-|9 years ago|reply
[0] - https://shieldbattery.net
[+] [-] pnathan|9 years ago|reply
I regret the amount of time I spent. It deeply harmed my health, harmed my social relationships, harmed my school, and limited my world. It was empty success.
My total `/played` in WoW wound up well over 2 years at this point over a 5 year period, I believe. And WoW was not the only game I've played. I've not logged on in years, and I don't care to reactivate and do the math.
On the other hand... they were inexpensive entertainment that worked out well for my living situations. Some of them provided great relationships and wonderful bonding experiences with other humans from all over the world. Games motivated me to get into software development.
Yet, had I limited myself in time and taken the time saved from games to doing more programming, more art, and more reading (all perfectly doable and feasible for the life situations I was in when I was spending time gaming that much), I'd be a better human today. Period. Video games are fine in responsible amounts, and I consumed in vast and irresponsible amounts.
These days I pull out Dwarf Fortress every couple months and spend the evenings on a weekend Striking the Earth, and that's appropriate and responsible in my life at present. I encourage my colleagues who have freshly graduated from college to limit their gaming and to use that time to improve themselves in other ways more engaged in the totality and diversity of human life.
[+] [-] twoquestions|9 years ago|reply
These days however, I feel guilty whenever I fire up a game, even one I really enjoy. I feel like I should be doing something more 'real', like playing guitar or building something, even if it's trivial.
It's strange, because in the end enjoying my time gaming with my friends or playing guitar with them or building things for them add up to be the same.
[+] [-] dragontamer|9 years ago|reply
Watching a single football game per week takes up more time. Honestly, 3-hours / week for an entertainment venue you enjoy is kinda small.
The average football game is 3-hours 12 minutes. The average baseball game is 2-hours 54 minutes.
I find it strange that in our culture, its fine to spend hours upon hours of watching Football, Basketball, Hockey, Baseball (and then play fantasy football and otherwise participate in social norms for even more hours throughout the week).
But a paltry 3-hours of video games spread out in a few sessions per day? That's outrageous!
----------
Lets compare apples to apples here. If you spend 3-hours gaming per week, its equivalent to watching a single game of football or baseball per week. Its honestly nothing to be ashamed of.
Now I played "Maple Story" (an awful MMORPG) for 4-hours a day at my peak. THAT is shameful and a waste. But 3-hours a week is more than reasonable, and just as healthy as any other entertainment venue. Hell, its arguably better to actually have your mind active in a video game than other, more passive, forms of entertainment.
Real hobbies (music, art, creation, programming, engineering...) probably are the best for your brain though. And you get useful skills to boot.
[+] [-] overcast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnarcoregrizz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|9 years ago|reply
I think this is really the underappreciated factor in why people prefer video games to jobs. For some people, it's not that they're lazy and games are an excuse to avoid work, it's that the games are actually a far better work experience than the average job. You don't have to go to any meetings where an HR manager breathlessly explains how the new performance assessment web app is going to make everything better, even though it just looks like a reskin of the one you used last year. You don't have to spend a single nanosecond thinking about whether you're going to be edged out for a promotion by someone who has a better rapport with the boss. There are no especially demanding customers or government budget cuts eating away at the revenue you're paid from. You get to just do the goddamn work.
[+] [-] KirinDave|9 years ago|reply
Not many people here know this but I have a youtube channel where I have done an absolute ton of gaming content (mostly minecraft, but perhaps most famously a Dwarf Fortress tutorial series), as a way to practice my speech and work through a very difficult stutter.
And while I still respect and root for my full time youtuber friends, for me it felt like such an emply lifestyle. Ultimately you're just walking along in other people's stories, experiencing other people's visions, and working within other people's limits was increasingly galling. And short of becoming unpaid labor for those games via their modding scenes, you are a passenger in someone else's car on someone else's map.
Like television (and probably better than television, from a cognitive perspective), gaming is a great escape. But making it more and more of your life as some of this article suggests is a recipe for gradually detaching yourself from real life, real problems and real accomplishments. It's an addictive escapism, and ever year the authors of said escapism refine their techniques in a ruthless competition to keep you captivated.
And the best minecraft fort or cleverest warframe trick I've pulled off pales in accomplishment to selling a company I built, teaching a new developer a new skill, or anything similar. The minute that gaming becomes an end until itself, you end up sliding down a slippery slope to irrelevance.
[+] [-] panic|9 years ago|reply
Fourth: economics. Since every game is reliant on this addictive incentive system, every gamer harbors a game theorist, a situational logician blindly valorizing the optimization of quantified indices of “growth” — in other words, an economist. Resource management is to video games what African-American English is to rap music or what the visible sex act is to pornography — the element without which all else is unimaginable. In games as in the market, numbers come first. They have to go up. Our job is to keep up with them, and all else can wait or go to hell.
Numbers and economic incentive systems show up in many games, but they're not fundamental. Take a look at games like Journey, Portal, Gone Home, Yume Nikki, or many others which work just fine without numbers. The creator of Undertale, Toby Fox, had this to say in an interview (http://existentialgamer.com/interview-toby-fox-undertale):
TEG: I really loved the fact that many of the branches in UNDERTALE‘s story seemed to lead to miniature “voids” where I was forced to contemplate what I’d just experienced without being “improved” in any quantitative way. Do you think that as gamers and people we have become addicted to numbers / money / experience in general?
TF: The addictive quality of “numbers increasing” is what drives a lot of games. But some of the most important things in life can’t be accurately represented by numbers. As for people’s lives, I have no comment.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|9 years ago|reply
> The researchers found that training on the video game did improve the participants' performance on a number of these tests. As a group, the gamers became significantly better - and faster - at switching between tasks compared with the comparison group. Their working memory, as reflected in the tests, also was significantly improved. Their reasoning ability was enhanced. To a lesser extent, their short-term memory of visual cues was better than that of their peers, as was their ability to identify rotated objects.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|9 years ago|reply
It's not the best method but I try to set a timer for 30 minutes 3 times a week and try a new game I've never played. It's obviously not a perfect method but often that's enough time to decide if I want to dedicate more time to that game.
[+] [-] cableshaft|9 years ago|reply
This year the first one is Civilization VI, but I fully expected that.
[+] [-] dpeterson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vesak|9 years ago|reply
I think I'll start doing exactly that.
http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
[+] [-] ajeet_dhaliwal|9 years ago|reply
I limit my time playing them now due to work, my entreprenuerial engagements, wife and two children but I just got finished with Final Fantasty XV two days ago and it was the most magical time. Ignis is my new favorite game character. I'm convinced games are a better story telling medium than books, movies and TV. I never remember the details of anything I've watched but with a game I always remember because i actively participate in caring for the characters, healing them, making them grow.
There is a negative side, they can be too engaging, too much fun and too rewarding in an instant gratification sense. Sales at your startup not going well? A game can make you feel good, getting bullied at school? A game will help, but really we should deal with the real problem and then make time for games. If you do that they are great and I'm convinced they will get better and we have not seen anywhere near the full potential yet.